The sun was high overhead, but that August day felt cold to Kate O’Neal. She closed her eyes, and tears rolled down her face. Ma would be ashamed of her if she were alive. Fifteen years old, and she was behaving like a babe, afraid of her own shadow. How did she let mere strangers and their fears get to her? What did they know of this Botany Bay, this faraway place? They’d never been there before.
She licked her lips and inhaled sharply. The stink of mud and rotting flesh that hung over Portsmouth Harbour gave her empty belly a stir. She clasped her hand over her mouth. No! I will not puke. She needed a distraction. With a force of will, she looked around her, at the men and women, those bound in irons and chains, who shared her sorry plight.
Her heart started pounding. One of the men was staring at her. She shrank from his view. Pressing her hands against her chest, she struggled for calm.
Eejit! The man had simply looked her way. Did she think every man who looked at her planned to attack her? Of course not. No more. She would be brave.
Her resolve changed nothing. Her heart continued to beat very fast.
"Your opening scene must hook the reader or you risk losing that reader" sounds like good advice to me.
All right, let's examine what I have done here:
I put my protagonist under the microscope – characterising her in less than 200 words:
—she is young, fifteen years old, and by her name, Irish.
—she is in chains, a convict in Portsmouth, England awaiting transportation to Botany Bay
—her mother is dead, and she does not mention her father and other relatives.
—she is afraid of what she is about to face, and more importantly, she is afraid of men.
Would this characterisation win her reader sympathy/empathy, so they would suspend judgement till they discover why she is a convict and why she thinks all men want to attack her?
